It’s certainly an exciting time to be alive in the tech world, and there’s no denying that we’re all riding the AI wave. The NASDAQ has experienced a significant surge – up 30% YTD – driven by investments in AI-related companies. The 'Magnificent 7' have dramatically increased their AI investments over the past few years. In August 2023, Goldman Sachs forecasted global AI investment to approach $200 billion by 2025. These are just a few of the impacts we’ve seen.
While there are ongoing debates about the return on AI investments, it's clear that AI is also making a splash closer to home Down Under, as Australia’s largest bank has seen substantial benefits from adopting Microsoft's GitHub Co-Pilot . But it’s not just large Aussie corporations investing in AI and automation; here at BlueRock, we have implemented AI to enhance our operations and client services . In this article, we explore how SMEs can leverage AI to create efficiencies and drive growth.
Embarking on the AI Journey
For SMEs, staying ahead means constantly adapting and innovating – be it from products, and services, through to experience. AI truly is a “Swiss Army Knife for Business”, and as a tool, it has the power to enhance operations and drive growth by doing a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to manual, tedious tasks. When BlueRock began using ChatGPT 3.0 at the tail end of 2022, we identified tasks where AI could assist, particularly around pre- and post-service delivery. By automating these tasks, we estimated a capacity benefit of up to 10%, significantly impacting our metrics.
We recommend beginning your AI journey by identifying those manual processes suitable for automation and setting realistic expectations for AI's benefits. As we approach 2025, we've evolved to using a secure AI Chat instance using GPT-4o, with 90% of our staff finding it useful, saving on average 20 hours per team each week, and the capacity benefits continuing to grow.
The key takeaway is to start with a tool that can deliver meaningful impact. Progress may be non-linear, but testing is relatively inexpensive.
Overcoming Growth Challenges with AI
As SMEs grow, they face various challenges. AI can help overcome these challenges by:
- Efficiency in Operations: Automating manual tasks to free up time for strategic activities.
- Revenue Growth: Enhancing marketing efforts and customer insights through AI-driven analytics.
- Scalability: Implementing AI solutions that scale with your business growth, without proportionally increasing costs.
One quick way to leverage AI to spur growth is to evaluate the tools you already have before investing heavily in bespoke solutions. Many existing platforms come with AI capabilities that can be further exploited to benefit your business without incurring additional costs. These include CRMs such as HubSpot and Microsoft’s CoPilot.
For BlueRock, AI is helping us reduce the friction of working across teams and optimising our processes to get work done better and faster. It’s also helping improve working capital by reducing our cost to serve, helping us to maintain competitiveness in order to fund growth. Every SME will have unique growth challenges that AI may be able to solve in various ways.
Get Value out of AI while Managing Expectations
To those unique challenges for SMEs, it’s essential to make it meaningful to your business. This might mean employing AI for tasks like creating marketing content, qualifying sales enquiries through chatbots, assisting with client proposals, or enhancing communication through intelligent email analysis and meeting tools. Have a look at your Value Chain – the full lifecycle of how you get your work done. This will be unique to your industry segment, but it’s important that it accurately represents your SME so that you can make targeted investments – the key is to integrate AI in a way that complements and elevates your existing service lines.
Having said that, it’s also important to manage your expectations of what AI can do at this point in time – it’s not a silver bullet:
- Security (or a lack thereof) and your IP: Ensure that client data remains protected and secure within your organisation.
- Contextual Limitations: AI tools may initially know very little about your unique business environment so expect a learning curve.
- Focus on your “Value Add”: AI can streamline your operations by handling repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus more on innovation and strategic thinking.
- Automation Potential: Still requires an investment in time and understanding to make it useful in a repeatable and reliable way
One quick way to make the most of AI tooling is to give it a solid baseline from which it can generate a response – mastering “Prompt Engineering” ensures that you receive accurate and relevant responses.
By putting in a high quality prompt, you’re better able to enhance the efficiency and reliability of your AI applications – here’s an example of what a solid prompt entails:
How to Start Leveraging AI in Your Business
To lay the groundwork for AI, start with these 4 steps:
- Assess your current technology stack and its AI capabilities: Is AI embedded, configurable or custom within?
- Align AI with your business strategy, ensuring it addresses specific challenges you face: Do you have a plan for the future of your digital footprint?
- Equip your team for the AI transition: Are you and your business prepared for change?
- Ensure your data is organised and clean for optimal AI performance: How do you organise your data currently? Is it clean?
With these above steps, you can prepare for the next stages of AI tooling and integration within business. It’s important to look forward, rather than to what others dare doing, as, In the rapidly changing AI landscape, staying ahead means being proactive.
Talk to BlueRock’s Digital Consultants About Your AI Journey
AI presents a wealth of opportunities for SMEs willing to embrace its potential, but it’s important to invest in capabilities and training to leverage emerging AI technologies effectively. BlueRock Digital ’s digital consultants, and our partners at propella.ai , are here to assist clients with digital transformation projects, including a full suite of AI, data and automation solutions. Get in touch with our Melbourne-based digital consultants via the form below to discuss your AI journey with us.
